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Deadly Sentencing.
The alley disappeared.
The alley walls flickered, bricks became dark wood. The wet concrete smoothed into polished flooring, the sky above them closed, replaced by a ceiling that hadn't existed a second ago. Guillotines lined the edges of the space like spectators.
Two podiums rose from the ground facing each other across a courtroom.
The three men were inside. The woman was inside. All of them transported without transition, standing in different positions than they'd been in a second ago, their bodies rearranged by a space that did not ask permission.
The woman was against the far wall, near one of the guillotines, her back pressed against the wood. Her skirt was torn. Her face was wet. She was shaking so hard it was visible from across the room.
The three men were scattered. Two of them near the back, one at the defendant's podium. Judgeman had already chosen the first.
The man at the podium was mid-thirties, broad-shouldered, with a hardening quirk that had turned his forearms into something like stone. He was the one who'd been pinning the woman's arms. He looked around the courtroom with the wild, jerking confusion of an animal that had just been caged.
"What the FUCK is this?! Where are we?! WHO ARE YOU?!"
Ren stood behind the prosecution podium. Judgeman floated behind him. Enormous, dark, silent. Scales on both arms. Eyes sewn shut.
"I'll explain how this works," Ren said. The binding vow required him to explain the rules, and explaining them made the domain stronger. "You've been charged with a crime. You get one chance to respond. You can stay silent, confess, or deny the charges. After your statement, I present evidence and make my argument. Then Judgeman delivers a verdict. Violence is not permitted inside this space. You can't attack me. I can't attack you. Those are the rules."
"I'm not playing your fucking game, kid! Let me out!"
The man tried to step forward. His body stopped and slid back to the podium. He tried again. Same result.
Judgeman spoke.
The voice was low and flat and carried the weight of something that existed outside of human patience. "The defendant, Mori Takeshi, stands accused of the following. On this date, in the alley between Matsuda Laundromat and 14-B Residential Block, the defendant used physical force to restrain a civilian, pinning her arms above her head while his accomplices committed acts of sexual violence against her. This constitutes attempted sexual assault by way of accessory in the first degree, in violation of Penal Code Article 177."
Judgeman produced an envelope. Placed it on Ren's podium.
The man's face went through several things in about three seconds. Confusion, recognition, then the hard mask of someone deciding to fight.
"That's bullshit. I didn't touch her like that. I was just holding her down because she was being hysterical. My friends were trying to calm her down. She was screaming at nothing and we were helping."
Denial. With a fabricated story.
Ren opened the envelope. One item. A text message chain pulled from the defendant's phone. Three messages sent to the group chat between the three men, timestamped forty minutes before the assault. The first message was the woman's photo, taken from across a bar. The second was an address. The third read: *she's walking home alone. let's go.*
"The defendant claims he was restraining the victim because she was 'being hysterical' and that his accomplices were 'trying to calm her down.'" Ren held up the messages. "The evidence submitted by Judgeman is a text chain from the defendant's own phone, sent forty minutes before the assault, containing a photograph of the victim taken without her knowledge, her walking route, and a message coordinating the attack. The defendant didn't stumble into a woman having a breakdown. He followed her. He planned this. His story is a fabrication and his own words prove it. The prosecution rests."
Judgeman's scales tilted. One side dropped.
"Guilty. Sentence: Confiscation. Permanent"
The man's face changed. Something left his body. You could see it in his posture, the way his shoulders dropped, the way his stone-hardened forearms softened and went back to normal skin. His quirk was gone. His eyes went wide and his hands opened and closed, reaching for something that wasn't there anymore.
"What did you... what did you DO?!"
Ren didn't answer him. "Next."
The second man was moved to the podium. Tall, lean, late twenties. He had a compression quirk that let him increase air pressure in a small radius. He was the one who'd been standing over the woman.
He looked different from the first one. Not angry. Not confused. Scared. Properly scared. He'd just watched his friend lose his quirk in thirty seconds and he understood, with the clarity of a man who had just seen something impossible, that this was real and that fighting it was not an option.
Judgeman spoke again.
"The defendant, Hayashi Reo, stands accused of the following. On this date, in the alley between Matsuda Laundromat and 14-B Residential Block, the defendant used physical positioning and intent to commit sexual assault against a restrained civilian. This constitutes attempted sexual assault in violation of Penal Code Article 177."
Envelope on the podium.
Ren looked at the man. "You have three options. Silence, confession, or denial."
The man opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the podium. Looked at Judgeman. Looked at his friend standing at the back of the courtroom with softened arms and empty eyes.
He said nothing.
Silence.
Ren opened the envelope. A screenshot from the same group chat. The defendant's messages. One from earlier that evening: *I'll handle the skirt. You two hold her.* Sent at 11:47 PM. Three hours ago.
"The defendant has chosen to remain silent, offering no defence against the charges. The evidence submitted by Judgeman is a message from the defendant's phone explicitly stating his intended role in the assault. His own words assign him the act. No defence has been offered. None was needed. The prosecution rests."
Judgeman's scales tilted.
"Guilty. Sentence: Confiscation. Permanent"
The second man's legs buckled. He caught himself on the podium. His compression quirk was gone. The faint pressure he always carried in the air around him vanished and the space around his body felt suddenly, noticeably empty.
He just stood there with his hands on the podium and breathed.
Two down.
Three consecutive trials in a single domain activation. Six months ago this would have left him on the floor. Now his regeneration quirk was pulling CE back into his reserves faster than the domain could spend it. The drain barely registered. Like pouring water out of a bucket that was being refilled from a hose.
The third man was moved to the podium.
He was older than the other two. Early forties. Average height, average build. He had a memory quirk, short-range, the ability to briefly suppress a person's recall within arm's length. The kind of quirk that had obvious applications for someone who didn't want their victims to remember clearly.
He'd been the one with his hand over the woman's mouth.
Ren looked at him and waited for Judgeman to announce the charges.
Judgeman was silent for a moment, longer than the previous two. The air in the courtroom shifted.
Then Judgeman's stitched eyes moved.
The threads pulled. Strained. Like something behind them was pushing outward.
When Judgeman spoke, the voice was different. The flat impartiality was gone, what replaced it was something that sounded, for the first time since Ren had awakened this domain, like anger.
"The defendant, Uchida Kengo, stands accused of the following."
A pause. The courtroom was completely silent.
"On multiple occasions between March of last year and January of this year, the defendant committed repeated acts of sexual violence against a minor. The victim was seven years old at the time of the first offence. The defendant used his registered quirk, Memory Suppression, to impair the victim's ability to recall the assaults. This constitutes aggravated sexual assault of a minor with quirk-assisted concealment, in violation of Penal Code Article 176 and Quirk Restriction Law Article 4, Section A, Clause 2."
The courtroom went dead.
The woman against the wall made a sound. Small and broken.
The two men at the back of the room stared at the third.
Ren stared at him.
Seven years old.
The words landed in his skull and sat there. Seven years old. Ten months. Memory Suppression. A child who couldn't remember what was done to him because the man standing ten feet away had reached into his head and taken it.
The teacher's memories hit before Ren could stop them. A girl's wrists. Long sleeves pushed up. Yellow-green bruises. A CPS report marked "unsubstantiated" in forty-eight hours. A man who tried to help and died in a motel room because the system decided the truth was less important than the comfort of people who didn't want to hear it.
Different face. Different child. Same crime. Same world that looked the other way because looking at it directly was too uncomfortable.
The man's face had gone white. Being seen in a room where nothing could be hidden from the thing with sewn eyes floating above the prosecution's head.
"That's... no. No. That's a lie." His voice cracked. "That was my nephew. He's family. I would never... why would I ever do something like that? I was watching him. I was babysitting. I changed his clothes because he had an accident. That's all. That's ALL."
Denial. With a story. With details designed to reframe.
Ren's hands were shaking.
He opened the envelope.
His hands stopped shaking.
Inside was a medical report. Detailed. Clinical. The kind of document that existed because someone, at some point, had taken a seven-year-old boy to a hospital and a doctor had written down what they found. The injuries were listed in medical terminology that Ren didn't fully understand. He didn't need to. The conclusion at the bottom was in plain language.
*Findings consistent with repeated sexual trauma over a period of approximately ten months.*
Ren looked up from the document.
"The defendant claims he was babysitting. That he changed the child's clothes because of an accident." Ren's voice was steady. "The evidence submitted by Judgeman is a medical report from a children's hospital documenting injuries on a seven-year-old boy consistent with ten months of repeated sexual assault. The defendant possesses a quirk that suppresses short-term memory within arm's reach. He used this quirk on a child to ensure the child could not recall what was being done to him. The medical evidence exists because a doctor saw what the defendant's quirk was designed to hide. The defendant did not change a child's clothes because of an accident. The defendant assaulted a child and used his own ability to erase the proof from the victim's mind."
Ren put the document down.
"The prosecution rests."
The courtroom was silent. The man at the podium had stopped talking. His mouth was open but nothing was coming out. His hands gripped the edge of the wood so hard his fingers were bloodless.
Judgeman's eyes opened.
Both of them. The stitches parted like they'd never been sewn at all. Behind them were eyes that were not human and were not kind. Wide and dark, looking directly at the defendant.
"Guilty."
The scales slammed.
"Sentence: Death."
The gavel in Ren's hand changed.
The weight shifted, the shape elongated, the dark metal dissolved and reformed into something else entirely, a blade made of cursed energy condensed into an edge so fine that looking at it directly hurt. The Executioner's Sword, built to instantly kill a person on contact.
The domain dissolved. The courtroom vanished. The alley came back. Rain, wet concrete, brick walls, the konbini light at the corner.
Three men. One woman. One sword.
The first two were on the ground. They were crawling backward, away from Ren, away from whatever they had just been inside of.
The third man, Uchida, was on his knees. Because his legs had given up. His quirk was gone. His eyes were wide and empty and wet. He looked up at Ren and his mouth moved and nothing came out.
Then he ran.
Or tried to. His legs weren't working right without his quirk, the memory suppression had been passive and losing it had done something to his coordination, his nervous system struggling to recalibrate.
He got up, stumbled, caught himself on the alley wall, and ran. Tripping, staggering, shoes slipping on wet concrete. Heading for the mouth of the alley. Heading for the street. Heading for anywhere that wasn't here.
Ren watched him go for about three seconds.
Then he started walking.
The sword at his side. The rain falling around him. His footsteps even and unhurried on the wet ground.
"You're scum."
The man stumbled. Hit the wall. Pushed off it and kept going. His breathing was ragged and loud in the narrow alley.
Ren kept walking the exact same pace. The distance between them wasn't growing.
"You deserve death."
The man made it maybe fifteen metres before his legs gave again. He went down on his hands and knees in a puddle. Tried to get up. Slipped. Tried again. His fingers clawed at the wet concrete.
Ren kept walking.
The sword hummed in his hand with a sound that wasn't really a sound, more like a vibration in the air that you felt in your teeth. The rain hit the blade and evaporated on contact, thin wisps of steam trailing behind him as he walked.
The man was crawling now. Hands and knees. Sobbing. The sound echoed off the alley walls and came back distorted.
Ren stopped behind him.
"You're worthless."
The man rolled onto his back. Looked up. Ren was standing over him with the rain running down his face and the sword at his side and an expression of rage.
Something within Ren, the part that felt hollow felt alive again.
The konbini light at the corner cast a yellow glow that reached just far enough into the alley to catch the blade. The woman was still against the far wall, torn skirt, shaking hands. The other two men were gone. They'd crawled away while Ren wasn't looking.
He thought about the teacher. About the girl with bruises on her wrists. About a report marked "unsubstantiated" and a system that had killed the only person who tried.
He thought about a seven-year-old boy who couldn't remember what had been done to him because the man lying in front of him had reached into his skull and taken the memory away.
Ren raised the sword.
And then he—
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